Inventions That Changed the World

A handful of ideas reshaped everything that came after them.

The printing press, around 1440, made knowledge cheap to copy. Literacy, science and the modern world all trace back to it. It is probably the most important information technology before the internet.

Electricity, over the 19th century, was really a cascade of inventions: the battery, the generator, the light bulb, the motor. It turned night into day and powered every machine since.

The steam engine, in the early 1700s and improved by Watt in 1769, gave us power that did not come from muscle, wind or water, and it could be put anywhere. It drove the Industrial Revolution.

Vaccines, from Jenner's smallpox vaccine in 1796 to modern mRNA, are the greatest life-saver in medical history. Smallpox, which killed around 300 million people in the 20th century alone, has been wiped out.

The computer shrank from room-sized machines to the chip in your pocket, and it did not just automate work, it created whole new worlds of software, data and AI.

The internet, starting in 1969 and opening up through the web in the 1990s, connected the world's computers and then its people, and dropped the cost of communication to almost nothing.

GPS, built through the 1980s and 90s, is a constellation of satellites that tells any device where it is. It quietly runs navigation, shipping, farming and even banking timestamps.

The smartphone, from 2007, folded the camera, computer, internet, GPS and telephone into one object and put a supercomputer in billions of pockets.

If there is a pattern, it is this: each of these dramatically lowered the cost of something basic. Copying knowledge, physical power, calculation, communication. When you have an idea, a useful question to ask is what it makes cheap that used to be expensive. The innovations page picks that up.